I ran across CamBam and am considering purchasing it. One of the projects I want to do it to import a photograph and relief carve the image onto wood. Then inset that carving into a plaque. I have included images to show you what I mean.

Currently, I am using easel to create the plaque. Then use Meshcam to import the image of the dog and create the carving. Unfortunately, I cannot get easel or Meshcam to do both operations but that is not my real issue. I can work around that.

What I want to do with the relief carving is to carve out the image of the dog in this example and than mill a circle completely through the stock in order to inset that dog carving into the center of the plaque. In this case, that circle is 5 1/2" X 1/4" deep.

I have gone to Meshcams forum and asked how to get Meshcam to mill out a 5 1/2" circle around the dog image but I have had no answers to my inquiry. In fact, they have not "approved" my question to be added to the forum. It has been 2 weeks now. Tends to make me not want to purchase their software!

So, can CamBam do the mesh carving like Meshcam? Can it then mill out the 5 1/2" circle? I am a one man hobbyist, not a big shop. So Aspire, V-carve etc are not options for me.

Check out the heightmap plugin. It generates a 3d raster from a B&W bitmap, with the heights depending on the grey level. Each raster line can then be engraved. The circle part is petty vanilla CamBam function.

Here's a quick cb file to try it out. It's not perfect by any means as I did it quickly tonight, but it does show that CamBam can do it all.That was all cut out of one piece of wood, no inserts, but you could easily do the insert method if using contrasting timbers for example.

I got the dog's age wrong, sorry and the font was just picked at random.

5. Draw a Polyline around the dogs head, freehand (there are other ways to do this but needs a better bitmap outline initially)Use the 'Flatten' plugin to move the polyline to Z=0Make a copy of the polyline (copy / paste)

6. Select one of the polylines and also the 140 diameter circle then, Edit->Convert To->RegionSelect the Region and add a Pocket MOP (Machining Operation)Set the parameters to your machine and tool requirements.

7. Select the bitmap and add a 3DProfile MOPin parameter 'Boundary Method' choose 'Selected Shapes'in parameter 'Boundary Shape IDs' enter the number of the polyline copy.cut down to -2.9 to leave a final 0.1 'skin' for finishing

Yep...I down loaded them. I'm taking one step at a time in order to better learn this. So I am doing the dog first and would like to cut it out as a separate entity (for now). After I get this down, I will try the whole thing.

I am having some difficulties figuring out how to mill out the perimeter of the stock. The stock is 1/2" thick. When I click on the circle around the dog, I don't know what settings to use to cut through the stock to make the 140 mm circle.

OK EddyI took your example and ran it on my CNC. Pic is attached. It cut out the image of the dog as well as the circle. I studied the file I downloaded and if finally dawned on me that when the region was created from the two polylines and then a profile was made from that region, it milled the max depth (-12.5) on both polylines of the dog and the outer perimeter.

So, I created another circle and made it 1mm bigger than the first circle, then used that circle to create a MOP using the -12.5 max depth and set the tabs.

I don't know if I made sense with my explanation so I attached the file for your review.

Am I on the right track here? if there is a better way, I'd love your opinion.

I also wanted to ask you why it milled that area just outside of the dog image. It is at a different depth. It shows a blue tool path when looking at the file itself. It did the same thing on mymillitest file as well.